The Cootings Machine pollution episode is a four-day street pollution event that disrupts life inside the Artificial Friend store and exposes the physical vulnerability of Artificial Friends to environmental conditions. The machine’s smoke blocks the sky and the Sun’s nourishment, weakening Klara; its later return in a larger, more polluting form shows that destroying one machine did not resolve the underlying problem.

Causes and Arrival

The threat is preceded by days of preparation. Overhaul men cordon off a special section of the street with wooden barriers, provoking taxi drivers to sound their horns. The workers then drill and break up the ground, including parts of the sidewalk. The noise frightens the two Artificial Friends in the window; at its worst, Rosa covers her ears even as customers are present. The Manager apologizes to each customer, while one visitor points to the work outside and warns about the danger of Pollution.

When the machine arrives, Klara initially suspects it may be intended to fight Pollution. Rex corrects her: it is designed to make more. The machine identifies itself with the word Cootings in large letters on its side, and Klara adopts that name for it. Its three short roof funnels first release small white puffs, then darker smoke, until the separate clouds become a thick, continuous plume. The source is plainly visible, but the activity has been authorized to continue in the street despite the concern it provokes among people inside and outside the store.

Smoke at the Store

From her position beside the magazines table, Klara watches the smoke transform the view through the window. The street seems divided into vertical panels, with different shades of gray; familiar details remain visible through them, including a section of the wooden barrier, the front of a taxi, and a traffic signal with a bird perched on it. A runner crossing from one panel into another appears to change in size and trajectory. As the Pollution worsens, however, the sky disappears from view and dirty dots cover the window glass.

The two boy Artificial Friends waiting in the window keep their posture, but one raises an arm across his face as if the Pollution might get through the glass. The Manager climbs onto the platform to reassure him, then tells the store that the disturbance should last only a few days. Her effort to soothe the others does not change what the smoke is doing to the light: for a time, daytime becomes almost like night, and the Sun’s familiar patterns vanish from the floor, alcoves, and walls.

Klara worries that the loss of sunlight means the store’s Artificial Friends will not receive enough nourishment. The Manager laughs off the concern, saying that a similar machine has been there several times before and no one in the store has suffered. Yet after four continuous days of Pollution, Klara feels herself weakening. She tries to hide it from customers, but the store has long stretches without any; sometimes she lets her posture sag, and Rex has to touch her arm to remind her to stand straight.

Removal and Immediate Aftermath

The Sun’s patterns return faintly toward the end of the second bad afternoon, despite the smoke being worse than before. The next morning, the grid is raised and both the machine and its cordoned-off section have disappeared. The Pollution clears, the gap of sky returns bright blue, and sunlight pours into the store again. Taxi traffic resumes smoothly, and the runners pass with smiles. The reversal makes the machine’s effects legible not only as a change in the view, but as a disruption to the store’s light and to Klara’s physical strength.

During the episode, Klara has also worried that Josie might have tried to visit the store and been kept away by the Pollution. When the street clears, she briefly expects Josie’s return, reasoning that the improved mood inside and outside the store makes it a likely day for her to come back. By mid-afternoon she recognizes that this expectation is unreasonable, stops watching the street for Josie, and returns her attention to learning about the outside. The machine’s departure therefore closes the immediate environmental disturbance without resolving Klara’s uncertainty about Josie.

Recurrence and Failed Resolution

The pollution episode later becomes part of the reason Klara asks the Father to drive into the district of her old store. She recalls that they passed a machine operated by overhaul men, producing terrible Pollution, and insists that it must be destroyed. She identifies it by the Cootings name and its three funnels. The episode thus shifts from a remembered period of exposure to a practical objective: Klara treats the machine as a threat that can and should be stopped.

The Father explains that the machine contains a middle-market Sylvester broad generation unit, fuel-efficient and robust against dust, smoke, and rain but lacking real protections against a chemical attack. If P-E-G Nine solution enters its system, the substance would rapidly polymerize and likely cause terminal damage. This technical vulnerability provides the means for the Father and Klara to destroy the original Cootings Machine, but it does not prevent another from appearing.

Later, while travelling with the Mother, Josie, and Helen, Klara sees a machine behind overhaul men’s barriers, pumping Pollution from three funnels. Its body is a different shade of yellow and its dimensions are somewhat greater than those of the machine destroyed in the yard; its capacity to produce Pollution is also greater. The visible letters C-O-O confirm the connection. The Mother reacts to the gray mist passing the windshield with an angry question about how the operators can get away with it, but the scene offers no indication that the replacement is stopped. The return of the machine makes the first destruction a local victory rather than a lasting remedy.

Environmental and Narrative Significance

The episode connects environmental damage to immediate, embodied consequences. The smoke is not merely a distant sign of urban activity: it removes the sky from view, dirties the store’s window, blocks the sunlight on which Klara depends, and leaves her physically weakened. The contrast between the Manager’s reassurance and Klara’s gradual loss of strength makes the limits of institutional comfort visible. Her concern is also distributed across those around her: she watches the boy Artificial Friends flinch, notices the Manager’s distress, and worries about the store’s nourishment as well as her own.

The machine’s recurrence widens the significance of the episode. Klara can recognize, describe, and help destroy one pollution source, yet a larger one later occupies another street space, still shielded by barriers and still emitting smoke. In this way, the episode distinguishes a precise, identifiable machine from the larger continuity of the conditions that permit pollution to return. Its account of what is visible also stands beside the later dispute over Artificial Friends as black boxes: the machine’s external output is unmistakable, while the workings of artificial minds become objects of demands for inspection. These strands converge in a conflict over who is entitled to define a problem and what counts as an adequate response. When Henry Capaldi later asks Klara to volunteer for reverse-engineering, the Mother refuses consent and insists that Klara deserves her slow fade rather than being opened up for study; the episode’s environmental machinery and the proposed examination of Klara remain distinct, but both bring questions of exposure, control, and consequence into view.